Many computer-based online predictions tournaments have been designed so that a user/participant may predict the winner of one or more sports games. In these conventional online tournaments, all of the participants' predictions must be made before the start of any of the games. Also, in these conventional online tournaments, a user will know the identity of all of the games that will be predicted at the time the predictions are made.
One example of this type of tournament is an online National Football League (NFL) football pool. In an NFL football pool, each of the teams playing in each NFL game are known prior to the tournament. A participant in the tournament will make predictions about the winners of each of the NFL games that take place during the course of a single week. All of the participants' predictions must be finalized and submitted before the start of the first NFL game of that week. After all of the NFL games have been completed, a winner of the tournament will be determined to be the participant who correctly predicted the most games of that week.
Another example of a conventional online prediction contest is a National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) basketball tournament pool. In the NCAA basketball tournament, which takes place in March of every year, 64 teams play in a six-round single-elimination tournament. In the first round, each of the 64 teams plays a game against one other of the 64 teams (32 total games). At the end of the first round, the 32 teams that lost their game are eliminated from the tournament and the 32 teams that won advance to the next round. In the second round, each of the 32 remaining teams plays against another of the remaining 32 teams, resulting in 16 winners that advance to the next round. This continues until the 6th round, in which only two teams remain in the tournament and only one game is played. The winner of the 6th round game is the winner of the NCAA basketball tournament.
In an online NCAA basketball tournament pool, the 64 teams in the tournament and the first-round opponent of each team are known prior to the beginning of the tournament. Additionally, each game in each round is paired with another game in that round such that the two winners of the pair of games will play against each other in the subsequent round. Thus, the potential opponents in each game of each round are known prior to the beginning of the tournament. Before the beginning of the first game, a participant in the pool will predict the winner of each of the first-round games. Also, at that time, the participant will predict the winner of each game in all six rounds of the tournament, with each round's predicted winners based on that user's predicted winners from the previous round. At the end of the tournament, the winner of the contest is determined to be the participant who correctly predicted the most winners over the course of the entire tournament. In another embodiment of this contest, the games of later rounds are given a higher weighting than the games in earlier rounds in determining the winner of the pool.